Hey there,

We are trying to frame Ryan, an animation masterpiece, but YouTube must have their gadget set to change the URL of the film every few hours. Here is the direct link into the YouTube screening room. If you need to search for it or send the direct URL, google “Youtube Screening Room” + Ryan you should get there. Meanwhile, our frame of the film does seem to work, below. In fact now that you’ve loaded this page, it will probably start playing.

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Dear Friend and Reader,

I know Thursday was Thanksgiving, but this week was gay as Christmas. No, scratch that, it’s as gay as David Hasselhoff in this video.

Prop 8 news, an adoption win, Boy George, Harvey Milk and gay penguins: it could be that some of this stemmed from the Pallas Athene trine Chiron conjunction on Sunday, setting the stage for justice. She’s also been in Gemini since Aug. 4, so this week could have been brewing for a while. Gemini, as Genevieve explained to me, are the twins, symbolic of the same-sex and duality; so this combination of Gemini and justice sounds pretty gay to me, but I’m not quite satisfied that it’sВ Hasselhoff gay.

Shanna has added her two cents on the astrology of gay this week. She says:

“Uranus turning direct is terribly unpredictable, and because Uranus is associated with eccentricity and individuality, many in the gay community have claimed this planet as their own. So there’s that. Then there’s this T-Square going on between Uranus/Saturn opposition (But Uranus is pulling away from the confinment of Saturn) and they’re both squaring Pallas in Gemini, (keyphrase: patterns of duality). But there’s more! The resolution point (opposite of Pallas) is Cupido and Photographica in Saggitarius. Enthusiastic pictures of people we want to associate with…square the urge to individuate in our unique ways and (possibly) needing new structures? Getting loads of pictures about the flip side of partnership? (Sagg might answer a lot of that Hasselhoff question.)”

Whether attributed to astrology or not, we were here and queer this past few days. Proposition 8 protests have continued, and over 100,000 people have pledged “toВ carry petitions for a new ballot measure, which could come as early as the 2010 election,” according to Geoff Kors, head of Equality California. The strengthening of the opposition has also entwined with a weakening of Prop 8 supporters, which is the more interesting part of the story. Since the proposition passed, the media has picked up the issue for what it is: a civil rights struggle. And you know what the public thinks of people who are against a civil rights movement.

In an attempt to downgrade their status from Giant Assholes to Those Guys Are Jerks, the Prop 8 team is shaving off their more radical supporters, passing court orders that prevent the biggest bigots from getting involved in the coming court hearings.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

WE’RE NOW AT the beginning of Pluto in Capricorn, an era we’ll be in for the next 16 years. Pluto left Sagittarius on Wednesday, Nov. 26 at 9:50pm EST.

For its swan song, reminiscent of the dying words “Rosebud” by fictional newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane, the last words uttered by the dying Pluto in SagittariusВ seem toВ be: “Too Big to Fail.”

Too big to fail. What an interesting ellipsis used to describe what eventually would become the definition ofВ failure itself, specifically failure by becoming too big. Too big to know what was going on internally, too big to understand there were rules to follow. Too big to believe inВ consequences for taking onВ too much risk in the expectation of larger rewards. Too big to obey the rules.В How Sagittarian.

As Pluto in Sag inches its way into Pluto in Capricorn, we’re bearing witness to the fruits of 15 years of expansion in our financial sector without regulation, accountability or regard to ramifications, leading to “unjustified exuberance,” another definingВ term of these last 15 years. JustВ look at the last week:

On Wednesday, Nov. 19, proposed federal bailouts of US auto makers failed with Republican senators rejecting the Democratic plan and Democratic senators rejecting the Republican plan. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell sharply by 427.47 points or 5.07 percent, closing below 8,000 points for the first time since March 2003. United States financial stocks led the way with Citigroup showing a 23 percent drop.

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Editor’s Note: Driving home from Kingston last night, I noticed two stars hanging like spotlights in the sky, paling all the others in comparison. But they were too bright for stars, I knew they must be planets. It turns out they’re Venus and Jupiter. Using my astrology cheat-sheet, I know Venus has something to do with love, and Jupiter with the quest for knowledge. The NASA article below describes the night sky as these two planets inch towards each other, and I’m going to pay attention to the merging of Cupid’s arrow and a very interesting textbook: sounds like the potential for really good sex coming our way on Dec. 1st. And if that doesn’t work out, you can at least snap a couple of beautiful photographs of the Venus-Jupiter-Moon conjunction. –RA

This story ends with the best sky show of the year–a spectacular three-way conjunction of Venus, Jupiter and the crescent Moon.

It begins tonight with a sunset stroll.

At the end of the day, when the horizon is turning red and the zenith is cobalt-blue, step outside and look southwest. You’ll see Venus and Jupiter beaming side-by-side through the twilight. Glittering Venus is absolutely brilliant and Jupiter is nearly as bright as Venus. Together, they’re dynamite.

Add another stick of TNT and voila!—it’s tomorrow. Go outside at the same time and look again. You’ll be amazed at how much the Venus-Jupiter gap has closed. The two planets are converging, not in the slow motion typical of heavenly phenomena, but in a headlong rush—almost a full degree (two full Moon widths) per night. As the gap shrinks, the beauty increases.

On Nov. 29th (sky map) the two planets will be less than 3 degrees apart and you’ll think to yourself “surely it can’t get any better than this.”
And then it will. On Nov. 30th (sky map) a slender 10% crescent Moon leaps up from the horizon to join the show. The delicate crescent hovering just below Venus-Jupiter will have cameras clicking around the world.

Dec. 1st (sky map) is the best night of all. The now-15% crescent Moon moves in closer to form an isosceles triangle with Venus and Jupiter as opposing vertices. The three brightest objects in the night sky will be gathered so tightly together, you can hide them all behind your thumb held at arm’s length.

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Dear Friend and Reader,

Mercury is combined with Mars and Pholus in Sagittarius. It looks to me as though this aspect is about heritage, family legacies for good or for ill: the same interconnectedness we discussed when Arachne slipped into Sagittarius earlier this week, but more focused on the family.

Photo by Danielle Voirin.

Mercury conjoined with Mars is defined by Isabel Hickey as impulsive, mechanically inclined and possibly aggressive. It might seem like you are a corked bottle that has just been shaken and you are ready to blow, especially with Pholus in there.

Pholus is the centaur in myth who was given a special cask of wine by Dionysus, only to be enjoyed by the centaurs. Astrologers understand this to be a symbol of blood, and since only the family of the centaurs could partake, it is thought of as the lineage, or the power inherent in the genes passed down from generation to generation. When Pholus opened the cask by the prompting of Herakles, the centaurs smelled it from miles away and were whipped into a battle frenzy. They stormed the cave. Many died, Pholus included. Chiron received the wound that would pain him until he laid down his life.

Juan Revilla notes that Pholus is Luciferian in its energy. An image of the outcast at the kitchen table comes to my mind. To embrace the differences and to come closer to understanding who one is in relation to the family one arises from is a struggle each person much undertake in the process of becoming individuals. It is about breaking free, letting loose the wine and transforming.

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Terrorism is the religion of fear. It’s an ism just like the rest of them. I sent the photo (in the next post) to Rachel as an example of a picture that is straight out our darkest 12th house; this could be anybody’s kid’s room. So the message is, this could be your house. It’s not sold to us that way; it’s an ‘unconscious’ thought but we all think it. The power of this photo draws from the juxtaposing of the ordinary bed and the extraordinary commando cops on a plain old day. Terrorism spurts billions of these messages via image/concept called memes, charged with the notion of extreme fear. The killing is part of the problem and then so is the injection of fear into global consciousness, right down to you and me. I am actually staying pretty calm, though concerned, about this crisis I think in part because I have not witnessed one iota of it on television. TV is a major factor — its vibration, wavelength, sound quality (I don’t mean video, I mean television). And that conveys fear better than just about any thing else; TV is cold and it’s conducive to a lack of warmth. Photography is generally warmer and that is the intrusive part of this image. Anyway — I think we’re in a moment when we need to choose our inputs. What we put into our consciousness stirs up material in the 12th house, that hidden human interzone. It’s the place where reside our nightmares, our silent anxieties and our beyond-kinky sexual necessities (and every point along those spectra). It is the real 8th house. It’s a fertile place (where we exchange, but mainly with ourselves), and what you feed there grows dependably.

Dear Friend and Reader,

Three days into the attack, With Nariman House and Hotel Oberoi-Trident cleared, between one and three terrorists holding ground in the Taj Hotel and close to 200 dead civilians, now is an important time to pause and examine the situation.

We’ve been bombarded these past three days by news briefs, casualty counts and photographs from Mumbai, including the one displayed above of Indian commandos firing in Nariman House through someone’s bedroom window: assumedly, the man laying on the ground in jeans and a yellow shirt, in the forefront.

The South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) discussed media bias, particularly in CNN’s focus on American and British civilian deaths. Though at least four Americans’ and one Canadian’s deaths have been confirmed, there is no question at this stage that the majority of those killed were Indian. True, CNN is an American news source, but asВ Mira Kamdar, Asia Society fellow and author of Planet India, explained, even CNN International — meant for a worldwide audience — is focusing on the deaths of non-Indians. Why is this?

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